


Optical Illusions; Or, the Echoes of Angels in Our Eyes

by Meatball42



Category: Hamlet - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Drugged Sex, F/M, Genderfluid Character, Genderswap, Multi, Other, Polyamory, Recreational Drug Use, Revenge, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-27
Updated: 2016-10-27
Packaged: 2018-08-23 18:21:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8337952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meatball42/pseuds/Meatball42
Summary: Harriet has her feet on the ground and her head in some rather heavy cloud coverage. It'll take a bit of sunshine and flowers to get her through the winter.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mific](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mific/gifts).



> I tried to write genderswap, but then with slash, and then I threw my hands up and said 'How about we just dispense with labels altogether!' and this masterpiece was born.

Midnight Watch is a repurposed mansion at the edge of the fashionable part of town, situated between the private, residential historic district and the grubby and rusted warehouses of the merchant zone. A bastion of old money elegance, the Watch’s furnishings are creaky and wise with decades, glazed with a thousand polishings by generations of servants. The air feels thinner in its many rooms, like the dust from the shoes of poor folk has never once stirred its air. Indeed, it most likely hasn’t.

A lot of other things are filling the air now. Harriet doubts she could list them all if she tried, and she has a front row seat. She’s lying on her back on a rug that no doubt cost as much, once inflation is taken into account, as her tuition for this year, and above her smoke spirals up through the heirloom air and billows around the two-story-high ceilings.

Some of the people come to Midnight Watch because they enjoy making eighteenth-century tapestries smell like pot. Harriet’s been doing that since she was thirteen. She comes here for other reasons.

At her feet, two women are rubbing against each other erotically, naked skin sweaty and flushed, eyes rolling into the back of their heads. Harriet considers absently if they even know each other. She certainly doesn’t know the name of the redhead who’s sucking on her breasts and stomach. A few minutes ago it was good, but now his coordination’s shot and she shoves him away. He rolls until he hits a claw-footed couch. His breathing is labored.

Harriet rolls her eyes and waves a hand imperiously as she gets to her feet. A humbly-clothed employee approaches, and at Harriet’s gesture, spots the endangered patron. The OD is hustled out of the room toward medical attention. Few, if any, of the Watch’s patrons give the matter any attention.

Harriet’s high is wearing off. She snags a pipe from a short girl sitting on a cast-iron radiator, ignoring the scowl and weak protest as she takes a long drag. She snogs the girl before stumbling away, and all is forgiven.

Another lounge holds an old-fashioned ice box filled with new drinks; no one is dumb enough to waste aged beverages on the mentally impaired. Harriet fishes out a Danish lager, then realizes her shirt is still pulled down to expose her chest. No wonder she’s been getting looks. She tugs it back up, slightly annoyed at herself through the thick fog of whatever it was she smoked.

“Now that’s a shame.”

Harriet glares at the source of the catcalling, but has to blink away the angels fluttering around her field of vision. The man she hadn’t noticed on one of the terribly uncomfortable couches oozes charisma, enough to make her want to pull down her shirt again just to earn that sultry smile. His features have the bearing of royalty, the real kind you see in old paintings or sculpture, not the kind Harriet’s been around her whole life, balding men ballooning with self-importance and  cholesterol, slowly turning pink or yellow or gray with the encroaching of early death. Whoever this boy is, he looks like he’s descended from kings in spirit, not just blood, the way Harriet is.

He’s also incredibly sexy. And although Harriet skipped a bra tonight and her top doesn’t actually hide all that much, he’s aiming his fascination and obvious attraction at her face.

Head and shoulders above the rest of this place. Harriet closes the distance between them and straddles his lap. The smoke in her bloodstream has reached her head, floating her high above the scratchy material on her bare knees. The man’s hands searching under her clothes are warm and rough, catching on her skin like he’s flicking every nerve to the on position. His mouth is hot and wet and his tongue feels delicious against hers. Between them is only fabric and heat, and then only heat.

~ ~ * ~ ~

Tuesday comes, and Harriet is in Coding 680, absentmindedly finishing the homework module on her laptop while the professor drones on. It’s chilly, late in October and with the windows cracked, and she tightens her shawl around her. A gift from her mother, it’s made of thick wool, and better suited for the weather back home at Elsinore, where temperatures will have plummeted to the teens. But nowadays, the thought of wearing something her mother gave her for protection, even from the elements, is dangerously attractive.

Rubbing the fur trim between cold fingers, Harriet pulls up the latest news articles from home. Even the reputable papers have begun reporting her mother’s decline, and the tabloids are guzzling at the bleeding breast of her parents’ marriage. The truly rubbish magazines go farther, implying or outright stating that Claudia is weaseling in on her afflicted sister’s marriage; that the beloved First Gentleman Geraint has been confused and led astray by the wily woman; that Claudia is, in fact, poisoning her own sister by the day, say sources close to the First Family.

Harriet shuts her eyes and breaths deeply, focusing on the air scraping away the top layer of her throat, rather than the way her hands shake with a rage icier than the frost.

After the lesson, she walks briskly through the dusting of snow on the ground to the sorority house. Rose and Guilda are waiting for her, along with a few other Danish students. Most of them went to the same secondary school, and their parents are all part of the upper-class web of friends and business connections and blood vows, or else Harriet would be spending her time with more intellectually stimulating companions. Indeed, dinner is a crapshoot, awkward and nasty and full of utter drivel passing for the poetry of the intelligentsia. Harriet spends an agonizing hour and a half diverting rude questions about her family and pretending that midterms are giving her anywhere near as much trouble as her yearmates.

Afterwards, she trades a few quiet words with Marcella, a solid Hufflepuff of a person and one of the few acquaintances from home Harriet can stand. Marcie allows her to depart quickly when Lauren begins shooting angry looks in Harriet’s direction, and Harriet hurries out the door into the quickly-fallen darkness.

Ophelia’s dorm is a mere eight-minute walk from Harriet’s, but during the long winters it always seems longer. By the time she reaches her girlfriend’s floor, Harriet is chafing her reddened hands together for warmth and anticipating putting them somewhere warmer still.

On the door of room 24, a whiteboard hangs. Evidence of months of scribbles, mostly-erased, are visible, but most apparent is a crisp capital A in blue marker. Harriet takes in the symbol and counts out three long seconds in her head before knocking on the door.

“It’s open,” the expected voice calls distractedly.

Harriet enters her boyfriend’s room. It’s a mess as usual, clothes and paints and stained dropcloths and textbooks and swatches of fabric and various flotsam and jetsam covering nearly every surface, including the empty side of the room where Arthur’s roommate- alienated by the incredibly confusing concept of personal pronouns- left a month into the year. Arthur himself is standing in the middle of the disaster zone, looking much the disaster himself: wearing a long sheath of fabric, probably last year’s something designer dress cum wipe cloth, hair tied up but slipping out and gently speckled in paint.

“My dear,” Harriet says, amused, “are you painting that canvas or is it painting you?”

Arthur clicks his tongue, not turning around. “It’s nearly finished. I think… the lighting, if there were more blue in the background, then the light- here…”

Harriet takes a few minutes to tidy up, putting all the textbooks and fabric samples and important-looking papers on one desk, and all the art materials on the other, and dirty clothes in the hamper, and as for the rest… she stretches out on Arthur’s bed. For the rest, she’ll need some form of recompense.

An hour later, Harriet has finished reading her latest rebuttal to Kant, part of the literature review for her thesis in Politics. It’s only due to her own impassioned argument and an open-minded professor willing to be entertained that she could weasel in such an ethics-heavy treatise as her major writing project, but it’ll all be worth in when she can rub her holier-than-thou father’s face in an A-grade, sixty-page essay about morality and justice. Harriet’s been waiting to crow that I-told-you-so over the rooftops of Elsinore for four years, ever since Geraint convinced Harriet the elder that Harriet shouldn’t major in philosophy, but the latest developments have her burning to prove herself beyond anything she’s ever experienced.

Arthur breaks her out of her spiraling fantasies with a careful touch. “Harry, you’re shaking.”

Harriet looks down. Her hands are, in fact, trembling again. Her fingers twitch with some latent urge, curling and tightening like they are prepared to grip and squeeze.

Arthur takes her hands in his and rubs along her fingers. His hands are calloused in odd places, from brushes and pottery wheels and other tools of the trade, and they catch on Harriet’s skin in the most soothing of all touches- a trusted, welcome caress.

“Is it about your father?” Arthur murmurs. He curls up on the bed in front of her, letting Harriet put an arm around him and tug them together. He’s shorter and slighter than Harriet, who was a champion fencer and dabbled in rugby back home, but he seems taller when people listen to him.

“Yorick emailed me again. He says he’s nearly positive Claudia _is_ killing my mother, somehow, from things she’s said or done around the house. But he hasn’t been able to find out how.”

“The doctors can’t figure it out?”

“At this rate it’ll be up to the CSIs, or whoever actually investigates these things. I don’t know, the A Team, God himself.”

Arthur strokes Harriet’s hair and neck. He nuzzles into her throat. There’s not much to say, but Harriet loves this crazy man with all her heart, so for tonight she lets go of the murder simmering in her core and rolls on top of him, kissing him with all the faith she has left in the world. It all belongs to him, anyway.

~ ~ * ~ ~

Harriet curls up in a ball on the most Godforsaken, stiff, cold, scratchy, uncomfortable mattress she’s ever had the displeasure of being laid upon in her life. If pure rage could set things on fire, the mattress would be ablaze, and Harriet along with it. She digs her nails into its surface, but the thrice-damned thing barely even dimples from the pressure.

Or, it could be her hand simply doesn't have much strength at the moment. She’s not entirely sure what it is she took earlier, only that Lauren was taking it, and if that tight-arse was willing to let it into her precious pure bloodstream it must be quality. And, in point of fact, the world has gone extremely fuzzy, in the physical space- it’s the sharpening of every dagger inside Harriet’s heart that cut her to the quick, pierced her and made her bleed tears onto the blasted horrible mattress. Thoughts of sharpened swords and kitchen knives, the scythe of public opinion, a coldly bought bullet, a deadly drink deep enough for two, swim around her mind, until beautiful brown eyes fill her vision with warmth.

Warmth, for the first time in days. The stranger’s rough hands caress Harriet’s face, calling to the fires she recalls from their last encounter. When she tries to pull him down for a kiss, he takes hold of her hands, gently, until their momentum fails.

Harriet finds herself in the stranger’s arms, carried down the Watch’s grand staircase. She would be more concerned about anyone watching, about her or Ophelia’s reputation, about the information getting back to Elsinore, if she weren’t more than halfway-sure the noble stranger was bringing her to his basement to make her the next case for some sexy young CSI.

There are a thousand less interesting ways to go. Harriet’s thought about most of them.

She drifts in and out, finding herself bundled in a blanket, a soft cloud through freezing, misty air, under bright lights that make her duck her wet face, and upon a mattress a thousand time more comfortable than the Watch’s prestigious and painful fare. The stranger’s hands move over and around her, and then he’s beside her under covers.

His body is just as warm as she remembers, and his voice just as rich. “Do you have anyone who’ll be waiting up for you?”

Harriet shakes her head. “Girlfriend’s upstate. Art project. Weeping… weeping… trees. And flowers. God, she’s beautiful.”

The stranger catches her hand when it tries to scratch. “Sleep, Harriet. I’ve got you.”

Harriet burrows into his body as her head spins around and around. He smells fantastic.

~ ~ * ~ ~

She wakes up in a random bed. But at least all her clothes are on.

In the light of day- the actual light of day, he hasn’t pulled the curtains down like any self-respecting uni student, and deplorably bright rays of sunshine are clawing out Harriet’s eyes- he looks smaller. The same generous, soft mouth, the gorgeous jawline and plump cheeks, curly hair that begs to have fingers dug into it- but he looks humble, modest. He looks like the kind of person who’d take you home and put you to bed instead of fucking you on a hard mattress.

For the first time in recent history, Harriet wants to know her one-night-stand’s name.

She watches him until he wakes. It isn’t very long, but for the first time Harriet understands some of what Arthur rambles on about all the time, with light and texture and things.

Anyway, he looks like an angel. Harriet’s not an artist.

“What’s your name?” she asks when he blinks awake.

It’s another few blinks before he focuses on her. “I’m Horatio.”

“You in the arts school?”

Horatio shakes his head. “Wittenburg Polytech. Architectural Design.” He looks suddenly much more awake.

“What were you doing at Midnight Watch? We’ve got to be a half hour from your campus.”

Horatio’s skin is too dark to carry a blush well, but his averted eyes make clear his embarrassment. “I… I heard you went to the Watch.”

Harriet nearly blushes herself. “You went through the Guards’ vetting just to screw me?”

“No!” Horatio bursts out. He looks horrified. Harriet is a little disappointed, to be completely honest. “I just- I wanted to- I saw your Tedx Talk last year, about self-determination and perspective and passivity, and. I wanted to meet you. But I didn’t think you would speak to me.”

“That’s fair,” Harriet decides. “I don’t like talking to people until I know they’re going to be worth it.”

Horatio looks relieved. “Do you want to… get breakfast or something?”

“Yes,” Harriet says firmly.

They go to a cafe near campus, Harriet’s favorite. The waitress knows her order, and gives her a wink when Horatio is clearly looking, making him do that blush-and-moue move again, which is adorable. Horatio pays while Harriet is explaining the latest mores of her thesis. He keep up and looks interested and nods in the right places, and he has a wonderful smile, and all in all she thinks he’s a nice catch.

Ophelia is returning from her trip upstate in the afternoon, and since they slept in til nearly noon, Harriet drags Horatio straight to Ophelia’s dorm. He graciously accepts Ophelia’s trunk when Harriet shoves it at him, nervously trailing them up to room 24, and stands in the corner while Ophelia chitters about the daisies and nettles she took pictures of and sketched and how she nearly drowned trying to get a good perspective on some water lilies.

“Darling, I brought you a present,” Harriet interrupts eventually, waving at Horatio. The poor man suddenly has a deer-in-the-headlights look.

Ophelia turns on him like a beautiful tornado. She steps up close. Horatio doesn’t move, more like he doesn’t want to provoke a wild animal than anything else. Smart boy.

“Is he a good kisser?” Ophelia asks, staring deeply into Horatio’s still-widening eyes. “Are you?”

“Uhh-”

“He is. I think… he has lighting?” Harriet says, transitioning from confident to awkward in record time.

“‘Burning eyes of heaven’,” Ophelia quotes. “And good bone structure. Yes… You’d need oils,” she says after a long consideration.

Horatio does not look at all comforted, but Harriet lays down on the bed, more content than she has been in a long while.

~ ~ * ~ ~

It’s nearly midnight be the time Ophelia’s quiet humming drifts away. She’s curled up in Horatio’s arms, both of them more cuddly after sex than Harriet. Harriet is more the sort to get up immediately after an orgasm and start writing down a great idea she had back when someone pulled her hair just right. Horatio laughed at her, but his smile was forgiving and made her feel appreciated, rather than judged and found wanting.

Harriet knows she’s odd. But she doesn’t need to change, she just needs more odd people in her life.

Anyway, she wove together the next section of her thesis before checking her emails for a breather. The sight of Yorick’s email, subject ‘New Developments’, sends a chill down her spine, and she clicks open his missive with trepidation.

It isn’t bad news. The emails she hacked off Claudia’s account convinced the detectives (who apparently have no forensic training) to investigate her aunt’s finances, and they found receipts and shipping manifestos for a very rare, very expensive, untraceable poison. Claudia has been taken into police custody and Harriet the elder has a chance.

Harriet sits back slowly in the hard wooden dorm-supplied chair. She looks out the window, where the half-moon casts shadows over much of campus and a spotlight on the rest. She thinks about the paradigms that humans use to create their realities and she thinks about cowardice, and she looks back at the curled flesh of her lovers, safely inside from the cold, and she thinks about chance and choice.

And then she gets up and nudges Horatio until he shifts over and bends physics to fit three lonely souls on a twin bed.


End file.
